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An Anger in Korea Over More Than Beef

SEOUL, South Korea — When tens of thousands of South Koreans spilled into central Seoul on Tuesday in the country’s largest antigovernment protest in 20 years, the police built a barricade with shipping containers. They coated them with oil and filled them with sandbags so protesters could not climb or topple them to march on President Lee Myung-bak’s office a couple of blocks away.

Faced with the wall, people pasted identical leaflets on it, their message dramatically summarizing Mr. Lee’s image and alienation from many of his people: “This is a new border for our country. From here starts the U.S. state of South Korea.”

In the background, a female voice from a battery of loudspeakers led the crowd to chant: “Lee Myung-bak is Lee Wan-yong!”

Lee Wan-yong is an infamous name every South Korean child knows. A royal court minister at the turn of the last century who helped Imperial Japan annex Korea as a colony, he is Korea’s No. 1 national traitor.

The protests illuminate the shift in President Lee’s political fortunes. When he was elected last December, South Koreans hailed him as a long-awaited leader who could salvage their country’s alliance with the United States, which was strained under Mr. Lee’s left-leaning predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun.

Only six months later, Mr. Lee finds Koreans vilifying him as something Mr. Roh famously said he would never become: “a Korean leader kowtowing to the Americans.”

“While championing a pragmatic leadership, Mr. Lee overlooked Koreans’ nationalistic pride,” said Choi Jin, director of the Institute of Presidential Leadership in Seoul. “If what troubled Roh’s presidency was too much nationalism, Lee’s problem is a lack of it.”

The chants showed that the demonstration was not merely about the president’s unpopular decision to lift an import ban on American beef. It also tapped into Korean pride.

This is a small country in a strategic location with a deep sense of grievance about being manipulated by the great powers around it. Chinese emperors demanded tribute from Korea; Japanese occupiers forbade Koreans to speak their own language; American, Chinese and Russian cold war rivalries divided Korea in two. While mostly approving of their alliance with the United States, South Koreans remain acutely sensitive to any suggestion that they must do America’s bidding.

Mr. Lee’s slumping popularity was sown in his first glorious moment as president.

On April 19, he became the first South Korean leader to be invited to the United States presidential retreat of Camp David, Md. Days before the visit, his aides billed the meeting with President Bush as a momentous event — one that never would have been granted to leaders like Mr. Roh, who was often accused of being too nationalistic and anti-American.

South Koreans who had fought alongside the Americans during the Korean War in the early 1950s took to the streets in joy. They trusted Mr. Lee to save the country from what they called “leftist, anti-U.S. and pro-North Korean elements,” like Mr. Roh.

On the eve of the summit meeting, Seoul agreed to lift a five-year-old ban on American beef imports, imposed after a case of mad cow disease was confirmed in the United States. By traveling with a political gift for Mr. Bush, Mr. Lee demonstrated how eager he was to rebuild ties with Washington.

Little did he apparently imagine the reaction at home, among young South Koreans who had been watching with a cold eye.

Photo

Protesters in Seoul, South Korea, expressed their anger behind a barricade of shipping containers that had been erected to keep them from the presidents office.Credit
Lee Jin-man/Associated Press

“What he did was little different from an old Korean king offering tribute to a Chinese emperor,” said Kim Sook-yi, a 35-year-old homemaker who joined the protest on Tuesday with her two children. “This time, we give a tribute to Washington? It’s humiliating, bad for education for Korean children.”

The demonstrations began on May 2, when hundreds of teenagers held a candlelight vigil in Seoul, and quickly snowballed. By this week they had become so overpowering that the entire cabinet offered to resign.

Foreign bloggers watching the brouhaha ask: Why would thousands of South Koreans join protests about mad cow disease but not ask why Americans are not protesting American beef? Would South Koreans demonstrate with the same intensity if the beef came from Australia or New Zealand? What about Korean-Americans who eat American beef?

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To many South Koreans, however, the beef dispute is not entirely about health concerns or science. It is not entirely about the economy, either — beef from the United States is half the price of homegrown meat. To them, it is also the latest test of whether their leader can resist pressure from superpowers, even if there is good reason for the pressure, as is the case in the beef dispute. South Korea had promised to lift the ban once the World Organization for Animal Health ruled American beef fit for consumption, as it did in May last year.

South Korea has built the world’s 13th largest economy largely through exports. Nonetheless, historical resentments linger.

South Koreans in their 40s remember words from a popular childhood song handed down from their fathers and grandfathers: “Don’t be cheated by the Soviets. Don’t trust the Americans. Or the Japanese will rise again.” Koreans still chafe at the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union divided Korea after liberating it from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II.

Whether a South Korean leader can navigate this current of nationalistic sentiment can make or break his career.

When two South Korean teenage girls were killed by an American military armored vehicle six years ago, it first appeared to be nothing more than a tragic traffic accident. But many young Koreans who had grown to regard the American military presence with humiliation rallied in protest.

Mr. Roh, a relative political neophyte, quickly rode the wave into election victory.

But South Koreans soon grew tired of Mr. Roh’s ideological pronouncements, which often strained the alliance with the United States. They gave a landslide victory to Mr. Lee, who promised to bring pragmatism into the presidency.

“Lee was overconfident,” said Kang Won-taek, a professor of political science at Soongsil University. “He thought since people rejected Roh, he could go just the opposite.”

Many experts in Seoul draw a careful line between nationalism and anti-Americanism among Koreans. They say the recent series of demonstrations were more an expression of the former than the latter. But the divide gets thin sometimes.

Alexander Vershbow, the United States ambassador in South Korea, got a taste of the simmering anti-American sentiment when he emphasized the safety of American beef last week. “We hope that Koreans will begin to understand more about the science and about the facts of American beef,” he said.

The next day, politicians and protesters called the comment an “insult to all Korean citizens.”

Jeon Sang-il, a sociologist at Sogang University, said the men seemed to have shot themselves in the foot.

“These days, Koreans say there are only two anti-Americans in South Korea,” Mr. Jeon said. “One is Lee Myung-bak and the other Vershbow. They stoked anti-American sentiments with what they did and what they said.”

Mr. Vershbow expressed regret that he was misunderstood.

Correction: June 16, 2008

A news analysis article on Thursday about the connection between anti-government protests in South Korea and its April decision to lift a five-year-old ban on American beef, which many South Koreans fear may be contaminated, misstated the month in 2007 when the World Organization for Animal Health ruled that the beef was fit for consumption. It was May, not September.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: An Anger In Korea Over More Than Beef. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe